Monthly Archive for July, 2011

: July, 2011

If you’re one of those people who pay attention to objective reality you may be asking yourself – “WTF was John Boehner thinking in allowing the debt ceiling extension to become a major partisan battleground?” After all, the man’s not stupid, and no one takes seriously his claims to be on the side of the Tea Party on this or any other matter. How did he get himself into this blind alley?

You can’t eliminate lying, distortions, and exaggeration from politics. They are part of the business. But they couldn’t hold our politics hostage the way they do now if we had the courage and patience to keep asking questions even when the answers get uncomfortable. When BS overwhelms truth our politics don’t work anymore. We can blame it on politicians, but they just do what we tell them. Our politics is smothered in BS because it’s what we demand. The results show. …

We are beginning to understand that human “rationality” is a far more complex idea than we once thought. As a core in Congress threaten to blow up 150 years of American commercial dominance to make a point, it’s worth taking a closer look at the ways our personal emotional interests sometimes trump good sense. …

Chris Rock summed up the black experience perfectly when he explained, “I love America, but if you’re black you gotta look at America as the uncle that paid your way through college,…but molested you.”
Modern conservatives are like the relative in that scenario that failed to stop the abuse in order to keep peace in the family. We abhor what happened to blacks before and after the Civil War and we didn’t do it ourselves. But fully acknowledging what happened would put a gnawing blight on the honor of a legacy we deeply cherish. We feel guilty and defensive and trapped by something that we think is not our fault. …

Coulter is a commentator, but she has transformed that role into something previously unknown. At a time when other commentators couched their statements and felt embarrassment or shame if they were caught in an error, Coulter broke the rules. She would take a shred of a fact and shape it into something a hair short of slander. The rules that once stifled the world of punditry prevented anyone from calling her out on her tactics. They were playing checkers while she was playing football. …

It’s odd and icky the way we personalize complete strangers we see portrayed on TV. It seems like television trips some psychological wire, shorting the mechanism we use to separate our own sphere of life from someone else’s. It reminds me of the global outpouring of grief for Princess Diana or Michael Jackson. The world would be a completely different place if we had the capacity to feel that much empathy for people we actually know. …

It would be wise to ask whether the entire security regime we created in the terrifying aftermath of 9/11 was overkill in the first place. It would be sensible to ask whether we still need these precautions or if there is a better, cheaper way to maintain airport security. That would be a productive use of time and political capital. But we don’t seem to be capable of addressing problems that actually exist. That would require us to think the thoughts that make our thick skulls ache. …